Berlusconi poll recovery shakes up Italy’s election

NEW ‘CONTRACT’:Berlusconi has narrowed his gap with center-left Bersani by 4 points in just a week. He remains unlikely to win, but could force Bersani to ally with Monti

Reuters, ROME

Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi appears as a guest on the RAI TV show Porta a Porta (“Door to Door”) in Rome, Italy, on Jan. 9.

Photo: Reuters

Four-time former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi extended his surge in Italy’s opinion polls on Friday, increasing prospects that the center-left Democratic Party now leading the race will have to seek a pact with outgoing Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti’s centrist bloc.

With a little over a month to go before the vote, Berlusconi narrowed the gap with Pier Luigi Bersani’s center-left coalition by 4 percentage points in just a week, but still trails by 6 percentage points, a poll published on Friday showed.

His gains follow a blitz on almost every TV talk show in Italy, where the 76-year-old billionaire has mixed blistering attacks on Monti’s technocrat government, Germany and the left with promises to restore growth and scrap a hated property tax.

Berlusconi sought to maintain the momentum on Friday by announcing he would sign a new “contract with the Italians,” reproducing a famous stunt from a triumphant campaign in 2001, when he set out five election promises and signed them on prime time TV.

“I’ve heard Monti will do the same, but in his case it will be a contract with the Germans,” Berlusconi told his own Canale 5 TV channel, reiterating a frequent line that Monti’s austerity policies have been more in the interests of Germany than Italy.

The surge has been reminiscent of 2006, when the flamboyant showman clawed back 10 percentage points and nearly robbed Romano Prodi of what looked like certain victory just a month before the election.

However, so far, despite similar results in several recent polls, there seemed to be little chance of an election shock giving Berlusconi a fifth term after the stew of scandals and the financial crisis forced him to step down in 2011.

“Berlusconi has lost a lot of credibility, more than he had before the 2006 vote, because of the failure of his government in 2011, and his personal scandals.”

The poll showed the center-left alliance of the Democratic Party and the leftist Left, Ecology, Freedom party at 33 percent, down from 34.9 percent a week ago, with Berlusconi’s alliance on 27.2 percent and Monti’s bloc at 13.7 percent.

If the result is confirmed, the center-left would have a solid lower-house majority.

However, due to electoral law peculiarities, Berlusconi could lose to the center-left in the national vote tally yet still win enough seats in the Senate, where voting is calculated region by region, to stop Bersani gaining an upper house majority.

That is important because legislation in Italy must be passed by both houses.

The center-right has traditionally controlled Italy’s most populous regions, like Lombardy, Veneto and Sicily, which are awarded more Senate seats.

This means the center-left, even if it garners a small Senate majority on its own, might seek Monti’s support in the upper house to avoid a replay of Prodi’s doomed second term, which ended after his wafer-thin majority collapsed.

“Under the rather perverse logic of this race, Monti has to hope Berlusconi does well to ensure that Bersani has to include him in a center-left government,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, Italy’s top election expert.

A former European commissioner, Monti is credited by investors and foreign leaders with having restored Italy’s credibility, and any role he has in a future government is likely to be welcomed by markets.